Plus vibrant innocence.
Innocence always attracts the opposite.
Was she depraved, or merely
‘What if he’s watching us?’ she whispered.
‘Who?’
‘Andrew. His ghost.’
Samuel glanced around somewhat uneasily but then his essential practicality came to the fore.
‘Well if he is,’ he said, ‘he’ll just have to thole it. We’re alive and he’s departed. Life is hard.’
It was not the only thing.
Muriel had been trying to keep her mind focused on the dark events that seemed to presently lurk in her life but found that her hand, not unlike herself, had strayed into temptation.
And provoked the risen Adam.
A creature of sensation.
She wheeled over suddenly and straddled him, the first time she had performed such an action.
If Andrew was watching he might as well get his money’s worth.
‘Do you think I am wicked?’ she demanded of Samuel.
‘Only when you smile,’ he answered.
And they rolled down the hill into love’s oblivion.
15
’Tis not what once it was, the world,
But a rude heap together hurled.
ANDREW MARVELL, ‘Upon Appleton House’
When Jean Brash approached the gates of the Just Land she was astonished to see all the lights ablaze and three extremely drunk young men roaring fit to burst upon the verdant lawn – for Jean had green fingers.
Facing the men was an indignant Jessie Nairn; she seemed to have taken the place of the ex-blacksmith Angus, who doubled as Jean’s coachman, doorman and keeper of order in the Just Land. He was out in the streets with a paper likeness of the acid-pourer clutched in his meaty fist and woe betide the little swine if he was found.
Jean Brash and Hannah Semple had been closeted in a safe house in Laurie Street not far from the Leith Links, one of Jean’s many mansions. There they had met with various street-Arabs and keelies, a substratum of criminality but invaluable for reconnaissance. Her
It would not be wise to have so many visitors to the bawdy hoose, so therefore the safe house.
Now the hunt was on. But with no success so far. A reported knifing in one of the taverns, two sharpers cut savage deep and a man answering the description of the quarry. But he had disappeared out into the night.
A watch was also being kept on the Countess’s ‘hotel’ but nothing to report except various respectable pillars of the community ducking in for illicit pleasure, one of whom, Gilbert Morrison, had been politely screened from the delights of the Just Land due to a predilection for inflicting punishment and was indeed the very man who had left the welts on the
Which had provoked her to leave the Countess.
Which was the cause of this war with Jean.
There had been a violent run-in in the back wynds of the Tolbooth with one Patrick Fraser, who was a bully- boy for the Countess and had gathered a crew of like-minded thugs around him. During the fracas Patrick had received a sharp reminder from wee Donnie Toms that size is not always the point at issue. Donnie had kicked up a storm.
Blood had been spilled, bones broken.
The streets were hotting up. Various
The city was seething with disquiet and everywhere there was a feeling of things breaking apart, as if the earth was moving under the scrabbling feet of Edinburgh gentlefolk.
Nowhere more apparent than within her own grounds, Jean observed. For a moment she was tempted to plunge headlong into the rammy, because it had become so itchy-scratchy in the safe house waiting for news to break that she had left Hannah Semple to run the operation and walked briskly back through the streets praying that she might bump into a man answering the likeness of Lily Baxter’s sketch.
No such luck.
However, she would not take her grievance out on other folk but employ a stately approach.
Like Victoria Regina.
So Jean walked softly.
As for the roaring boys on the lawn?
Logan Galloway was a contemptible young snotter whose father had made a fortune exporting horses to France where they were no doubt cooked and eaten, hooves and all.
He was a skinny runt, nebby by nature, temper not improved by an earlier incident that evening when he and a companion had thought it great high jinks to don Halloween disguise and terrorise a meeting of the Spiritualist Society, in the certain knowledge that none of the impotent attendance would be able to lay a glove upon them.
They had been unpleasantly surprised to find themselves picked up by the scruff of the neck and booted out by a man mountain that Galloway vaguely recognised as a rugby player for the University.
Then they had been pursued through the streets by a madman brandishing a placard.
After giving him the slip, they had met with a similarly inclined young lout, drunk like sand-beds in the tavern, and presented themselves at the door of the Just Land for further recreation.
But something had gone agley.
As Jean slipped up by the shadows, the combatants were well into their stride.
‘You little hure!’ screamed Galloway, face flushed and eyes glazed. ‘You stole my money!’
‘I stole nothing,’ said Jessie. ‘Ye spent it.’
‘You’re a liar!’
‘And you’re mortal fou,’ said Jessie, a hint of insolence creeping into her tone.
A few catcalls from the lighted windows added to the fun and Jessie played up to the watching magpies.
‘Ye spent your money, ye had your pleasure. Now, away an’ cock yer feathers on the dunghill.’
More laughter from the windows.
Galloway’s countenance, which was not unlike some of the wretched horses his father shipped across the Channel, in that it was long, bony, and swivel-eyed, near sundered itself in wrathful umbrage.
‘How dare you address me so, ye little bitch,’ he almost foamed at the mouth. ‘I’ll split your insolent face!’
Galloway unexpectedly, for Jessie had him pegged as a wee bag of wind, threw out a haphazard fist and hit a glancing blow on the shoulder that tumbled her to the ground.
Flushed with this triumph and the sudden silence of the jeering magpies, though this may have been in part due to something else they had just noticed, Galloway lifted his hand to swipe the impudent wee
